


Scenes from a Coffee House

by twistedchick



Series: Sunshine [2]
Category: Sunshine - Robin McKinley
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-14
Updated: 2018-12-14
Packaged: 2019-09-18 08:13:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,204
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16991289
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twistedchick/pseuds/twistedchick
Summary: Finding a master magic handler as a teacher is harder than Sunshine expects.





	Scenes from a Coffee House

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kototyph](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kototyph/gifts).



After the SOFs found me and Con in No-Town, I realized that I couldn’t fly under the radar any more, or pretend that I wasn’t a magic handler. It wasn’t safe. Sooner or later they’d put together something about what they thought I might be doing that made it rain rotten vampire body parts, probably with another table knife, or maybe a spatula, and then I’d have to pay a fine I probably couldn’t afford. At least now Jesse was in charge of the local office, instead of the Goddess of Pain. Nobody talked about where she had gone; the SOFs I knew shook their heads when I brought it up, and asked for a refill on their coffee.

So, I went down to SOF HQ and, with Pat’s help, since I hate paperwork more than I hate yeast that won’t rise, I got my license, and contact information for three master magic handlers who could help me learn more about my abilities.

Well. Maybe. 

Meeting them didn’t go quite as well as Pat and Jesse and the others might have hoped.

The first one, a heavy-set man in his fifties or sixties, didn’t get up or greet me when I came into his office. He evaluated me with one glance over the top of his glasses, which were pushed down his nose, as he skimmed the note of introduction that Pat had given me. When he got to the part where Pat said that I’d used a table knife to off a sucker, he tossed the paper into his wastebasket.

“Get out.”

“What?”

“Get out of here.”

“Excuse me?”

“I won’t train a liar.”

I felt outraged at his almost rote assumption. “Nothing you’ve read is a lie.”

“Mother Durga,” he said, but it was clearly no prayer. “Nobody uses worked metal. Nobody can. I don’t know how you’ve convinced SOF you could do it, and I don’t care. Lying doesn’t go well with magic.” He swiveled his chair so he was facing me directly. “The door’s over there.”

“With all due respect,” I said, with a small bow, “take a flying leap off a skegging Carthaginian volcano.” 

I left. It’s never a good idea to offend someone who can literally burn your ass on the way out the door, but I don’t think he even heard me. He’d already turned back to his book before I was gone. I did slam the door, though, once I was on the other side of the industrial-strength wood.

The second possibility was a harried-looking woman of uncertain age, whom I met in her home. She offered to be a resource for me, but not a tutor or teacher.

“I am so sorry, my dear,” she said, pouring me a second cup of Chinese oolong that smelled and tasted of peaches warm from the sun. “I would love to work with you and learn from you as well, but I am entirely enveloped in a project for SOF and I will not have time this year or possibly next year.”

I appreciated her hospitality, as well as her honesty and willingness to help, even though it wasn’t that helpful since she lived up on Franklyn Heights, a good hour’s drive from the coffee house into one of the high-rent districts up in the hills.

“You may come as you wish and use my library for reference, though I ask that nothing be taken from this house. I will set the wards myself to allow you entrance to it at any hour, should you need it.” And after another few swallows of tea, she made her excuses to go back to work and waved me toward the library in the next room. It was overflowing with books and papers in shelves and on a desk. I read the titles, flipped through pages, took note of titles and authors and call numbers, thanked her again, and left.

When I told Aimil which books the master magic handler had, Aimil sniffed and said she thought she could find them all for me, so I wouldn’t have to drive that far. A lot of the books were in the reserved stacks at the library; since I was now registered I could go into that locked-off section and read them while making notes for myself. I took an afternoon off – Kenny wanted to try a new nut bread he’d come up with, and Charlie said that if it was going to help me and keep us all safe he was fine with me taking a few extra afternoons, as long as I was back for the dinner rush. Aimil and I went through the library stacks together to see what wasn’t there. The next Monday, when she also had some time off due to working overtime, we went to check out the two most likely used-book stores, and the back corners of the secondhand shops that took in books. We left with a dozen books that would at least get me started, and a small third-hand bookcase. Not a bad start for a personal magical library. I set it up in my bedroom, near the comfortable chair with the reading light that had the full-spectrum light bulb in it for winter.

The third magic handler, who had no name, only contact information, didn’t answer the two messages I sent, one on combox, one on phone. 

I waited a week for a reply. Some people don’t check their comboxes every day but most do at least once a week. Then, when no reply emerged, I mentioned this to Jesse, who said he’d check, but apparently never found time to get back to me on it because of the outbreak of wereraccoons and wereskunks in the business district during that month’s full moon. I suspect that some of the financial houses there found themselves short a few investors afterward. People with the money and connections to go into finance have the resources to hide their were-ness better than most, until there’s a blue moon, a second full moon in a given month. For some reason, if they change during a blue moon all the changes flare out more fiercely. Jesse said that this seemed to be more a psychological thing on the part of the weres, a concept that pushed the psychological trigger for the change, rather than a strictly physiological one, since they were still changing every 28 days or so, regardless of which side of a particular date of the month the change landed on.

But nothing else was happening. I didn’t want to remind the SOF guys that I hadn’t found a teacher, and there was still the coffeeshop work to do.

So I was on my own, more or less, unless someone happened to show up at Charlie’s.

* * *

Con took to showing up after sunset or before dawn to see if I liked some trinket or other that he’d found in a drawer, or check on how I was doing. We weren’t keeping a steady schedule; it was more happenstance, a visit sometime within a week’s time of the last one. The schedule wasn’t tight enough for me to lose too much sleep or worry about. He was allowing SOF to deal with the remainder of Bo’s gang, for which I was grateful, though I didn’t say anything about it to him. Instead of the usual thing a vampire would do when a major local vamp had been killed – such as getting an army together to take over the territory – he was spending his time on scholarly studies so esoteric that when he tried to tell me not one word made sense. But that was fine. It kept him happy, or as happy as it might be possible for an older vampire to be in a world in conflict. He didn’t want to fight, he just wanted to be left alone, and now, after all of what had happened, he had his wish: solitude, something to study, and someone to tell about it, even when I didn’t understand.

* * *

Charlie noticed things. He didn’t often say much, but he did notice. I’d come in one morning after a late night out with Con, when No-Space had been a bit more full of hard objects than usual and I’d banged into a couple and had a bruise on my arm and one on my chin. He raised an eyebrow and I said I’d stumbled on the stairs up to my apartment (I had, actually, but not that day or since I got used seeing in the dark.) He’d wrapped me in a hug and said nothing.

The next day I didn’t notice that he’d left for a few hours until I emerged from the bakery with a pan of amaretto shortbread, frosted and decorated for the multiday Holidays Festival. Somewhere in the last century some bureaucrat had decided that having Samhain and Day of the Dead and the Temporists’ Year-End Observance as separate holidays within a work week was Too Much Trouble, and mushed them all into one four-day weekend festival. It was a nice festival, though a lot of people celebrated their own Samhain or Dios de los Muertes or Temporist Observance Day privately as well, since the government-mandated dates seldom lined up with all of them.

I didn’t really notice Charlie being away, and not just because I was in my bakery most of the time. Charlie liked to move around. He’d stop off and chat with Mrs. Bialosky about her flower garden or her current street beautification program. Sometimes he’d go out into the square to talk with someone who wanted a bit more privacy than could be found in the crowded, noisy coffee house, where anyone could hear everything if they concentrated hard enough.

As a result, I didn’t realized he’d been gone for a few hours. Mom was busy balancing the books in the office, with the door closed, and nobody with any fragment of sanity would bother her when she was deep in the numbers. Mel was in the kitchen, cooking. Mary and Philippa, our new waitress, were taking care of customers. There weren't any emergencies, and things were normal.

But when I got home after work that day, a new handrail had been installed in the staircase leading up to my apartment at Yolande’s – with her permission, of course.

“I couldn’t really say no,” she told me, as we sat in the cooling garden and had tea and Dutch Chocolate Demons, my latest attempt at a lighter chocolate cookie that still carried some punch. “When I came here, there were no railings anywhere; I added them as I had time and occasion, but that one was left undone.” She nibbled on a Demon. “I have noticed that you have sometimes had bruises, but they subside quickly. That is a side effect of magic use. I did not feel that it was my business to tell him anything more than that.”

I took a sip of the tea, which was rose-scented and rich with flavor. “It’s all right. Thanks for not saying anything.” Apparently Yolande’s wards were also keeping out the chill in the wind that I’d noticed all day; I felt comfortable in the garden with my mid-weight sweater on, and the porcelain cup felt warm and welcoming in my hands.

Yolande smiled. “Your power has grown, hasn’t it? You’ve been using it for good. It is obvious to me, though it may not be to others.”

I refilled both our cups from the teapot. “According to SOF, I’m supposed to apprentice myself to a master and take classes, or lessons, or at least try to learn more, but that’s not working out.”

“Oh? Whom did they send you to?” She shook her head at the first name, muttered something under her breath about short-sighted, bigoted misogynists, and looked sad at the second one. “It is really too bad that Stefania is unable to help you; she has excellent skills, but she has been so involved in her own projects for years that even if she were not working for SOF she might not have been able to give you the attention you would need. And the third?”

“I don’t know the name; I was given contact information, and I used it, but had no reply.”

She nodded. “Some of our finest and most experienced people have been forced into retreat for their own safety, for being a magic user does not guarantee one’s own protection as much as one might think. And when they go silent, it may be that they are in hiding, or in a situation where any outside influence could cause immense trouble. Give it a little time.”

“Oh, I’m in no hurry,” I told her. “I have some things to read.” I told her about the books Aimil and I had found, and she went into her own reading room and brought out half a dozen more that I could borrow when I was done with my own.

When I went upstairs, one hand on the sanded-smooth-so-there-wouldn’t be-any-splinters new wooden railing, and looked in the mirror, the bruises were already fading; by the time I awoke the next morning they were gone.

One point for drinking a vampire’s heart’s blood as a healing factor, though I wasn’t going to recommend it to any doctors.

* * *

Over the next few weeks, I went shopping with Aimil and picked up some good clothes at the secondhand sales – both of us like the vintage looks much better than any more recent fashions. I continued to play with my pocketknife, which still glowed in the dark, enough that I would pull it out if I needed to find something in a dark place. I took the time to sharpen both blades, not just the longer one, in case there was something headed in my direction that could be conquered with a bit of one-inch-long edged steel.

None of the books, so far, had said anything about using worked metal, but they did mention not overstressing one’s tools. Too much magic through a wand, for instance, might make it explode, depending on the variety of wood. A knotty piece, for instance, might withstand a great deal without showing the strain, until it either fell to pieces or blasted everything within a quarter-mile radius.

This made me think about how the steel in my pocketknife might well have been folded over and twisted in various ways while it was being made. Granted, steel was a lot stronger than almost every type of wood, but there was such a thing as metal stress.  
Overall, I felt the knife had done its job already, and I didn’t want to push it beyond what the metal could reasonably take. So I started experimenting with other pieces of worked metal, holding them in my hands while I sat on my balcony in full sunlight, to see what would happen.

Apparently my talent for transfiguring had been forced into a full-on Spartan flow, since I had had to use energy so much. Maybe it was my realization that I could use my hands in No Town, and the recovery afterward from the idea that they had been damaged. Maybe it was the golden net that Yolande had flung over me, which concentrated and focused my energy. 

I had a set of half a dozen plain silver bangles that had been a birthday gift from Mom a few years earlier when she was trying to make me look a bit more Aphrodite. I seldom wore them because bracelets don’t go well with kneading bread, but I kept them around. Sometimes I put on a few of them when I went out with Mal to one of the biker bars. Some of his friends’ girlfriends and wives had silver bangles up to the elbow, which I thought was extreme in terms of defense – silver being a warding metal -- but it suited them, even if it wasn’t my look.

I didn’t think I needed to do that. My hands had ripped apart a master vampire; I didn’t think I’d need to worry much about anyone less powerful.

So I sat in the full sunlight and held a bangle in my hands and thought about complication and fancy design – and opened my hands to find a bracelet that looked as if it had been sculpted from lace. I could still wear it, it would fit, but I was going to have to save this for really special occasions – and maybe not around Pat or Jesse, who were likely to pick up on the afterimage of magical effort that I was sure it had in spades, and push me toward yet another unreachable teacher.

I set the silver lacework aside and picked up an old silver-plate carving fork. Could I try to turn it into a bracelet? Nothing I’d done so far was that purposeful – other than changing the little knife into a key. I wanted to see if I could do it when I wasn’t in mortal danger. The fork twisted itself into a knot around its tines, flattened a little, and never quite untwisted, as if it was trying to become a flower. I put it on the table next to a candle and stared at it. 

What was the difference between the fork and the bracelet?

Perhaps it had to do with relationship.

The bracelets were mine. I’d worn them a few times and they were stored with a pendant and some earrings that Mom had given me for birthdays. The pocketknife was mine, used all the time. But the fork was something I’d found in a rummage sale, and hadn’t used much. It was designed to hold a roast in place while it was being carved. That wasn’t as useful for a vegetarian as I’d thought, though it didn’t do a bad job on holding down a hardshell squash to keep it from taking off across the kitchen when I pulled out the big carving knife to open it up.

But I had other worked metal that I used, that was mine, things that I had opinions and emotions about.

Just as an experiment, I took an old baking pan, slightly rusted around the edges, out of storage and brought it over into the sunshine. I held it in my hands, closed my eyes, thought about the bread and pound cake I’d made in it as a new pan and slid my fingers over the rusted bits…and they felt smoother. When I opened my eyes again, the pan looked like new. No rust; it had de-oxidized itself.

Maybe this worked-metal ability could be useful for more than just my pocketknife.

* * *

“Have you found a master yet?” Con asked me one night, over a cup of strong unsweetened tea at my apartment.

“Not yet. One wasn’t interested, the second was too busy and the third was unreachable.”

He made one of those growly vampire noises that indicated how annoyed he felt. “Would you object if I were to see whether someone whom I know might be available?”

“Someone human? No, don’t answer that. Of course it would be someone human.” I considered. “This would be someone whose abilities you have seen?”

“Yes.” He cradled my cup so that it nearly disappeared in his long grayish fingers. “Someone whom I have seen at work, who may be able to assist you, though perhaps not with the same skills you have. Your abilities may be unique; still, there may be a master of the changing craft who can guide you, help you explore your abilities and make suggestions.”

“All right, then,” I said, “I can go for that.” We sat and talked and sipped the rest of the tea until I needed to go to work. 

I didn’t expect anything to happen for a while. With Con, time ran in different ways as much as space and distance did. He would find this person, or not, whenever it happened to occur.

* * *

“You have been working on your ability to do transformation,” Yolande said a few days later, as we sat in the shelter of her porch, drinking tea and watching the rain fall. “My wards are telling me about energy moving past them.”

“Would you like to see what I’ve been doing?” I asked her. When she nodded, I went upstairs and brought down the baking pan, the ex-fork and the bracelet.

Yolande picked up the bracelet. “Oh my,” she said. “This openwork is beautiful. If it had a few charged jewels set into it, it could be a powerful protection, even while looking like a fashion item.”

“How much would something like that cost?” I hoped it would be something I could afford on a baker’s salary.

“Hmm.” She turned it this way and that. “If you could do another one, it could be traded to the jeweler in return for the work. It’s really quite stunning.” She put it down and picked up the ex-fork. “Were you thinking of flowers?”

“I think I was smelling your autumn roses,” I said.

“It shows. Your thoughts are manifesting in your changing, as they should. Of course, you need some control over your thoughts, but you have never struck me as a scatterbrain. And this pan…” She turned it over and back again. “I was certain that the company that made it went out of business a while ago; I looked for one of these and could not find it. This looks brand new.”

“The rust … went away,” I said. It was hard to say anything other than the obvious.

“You know, if you ever stopped baking you might have a good income from fixing things that can’t be replaced, like this.”

“I don’t know how well that would work. I seem to need to have a relationship to the metal.” I winced at the memory. “Let me tell you what happened when my grandmother handed me her ring to change.”

* * *

Paulie was getting better with pastries and cakes, but still had some ways to go to get an understanding of bread. His sourdough bread was light and flavorful, nothing wrong with it at all, but his yeast mixes tended to be a little heavy, though everyone who came ate them without complaint. I seldom let him loose on cinnamon rolls; some part of me didn’t want to give over my signature creation. I knew that sooner or later I’d have to do that, but not yet. Besides, he was still figuring out when to use sweet butter and when to use salted butter. When he got that straight, I might consider it.

On break, out in the treeless little area behind the building, where there was light but not much else, I flopped out on one chair with my legs up on another and relaxed, trying to stretch each joint in them separately. The walls around me kept the wind out, the sun warmed the space, and it felt a little less like winter was close. 

That day I felt a bit confined as well, as if my body were not quite big enough for the inner me, and I wondered what that meant. Sun-self, deer-self, tree-self, dark-self … me-self? Sun-self, deer-self and tree-self balanced dark-self sufficiently for the moment, I thought, but where in all of this is the me-self, the baker self, the one who turned bangles to lacework and had two little brothers who were as ordinary as possible? Shouldn’t the me-self be a little more in addition to all the rest?

Mel wandered back and rested his hands on my shoulders, kneading a little, and I leaned forward and let him work out the knots in the muscles from the top of the shoulder down into the shoulder blades. In theory, kneading dough should give the baker a workout as well; in practice, combining that with wrestling with the recalcitrant door to the big oven hampered the process. I let my head roll back afterward and leaned against him.

“If you want to talk, I’m here,” he said, surely one of the less Mel-like statements I’d ever heard, and I turned my head to look up at him. 

“Is there something you want to tell me?” I asked him.

He shrugged, loosening up his own shoulders. “I’m not surprised you got your license. I don’t need to know the details. You look more at peace.”

“And?” Clearly there was more, from the way his hands stopped moving on my shoulders.

“I might know someone who could help you with it. If you want. I can check.”

I thought about this, thought about Mel’s past as a messenger, and whom he might have been carrying messages from and to. And then I remembered my vision of him with his hands out, sending me energy and protection when Con and I were fighting our way through a river of death.

“Why didn’t you tell me you’re a magic user, too?” It came out before I could bite it back.

Mel rubbed one of his tattoos, the hourglass, with the hand that wasn’t on my shoulder. “Never seemed like the right time or place. I picked up a little during the War, here and there, kept me alive. Didn’t get any real training in it, just what I needed at the time.”

“But you know someone?”

“I know a lot of people, Sunshine. So do you.” His smile faded. “Don’t even know if the ones I’m thinking of are still around.”

I nodded. Having an unregistered magic user as a boyfriend wasn’t a bad thing. And among Yolande, Con and Mel, someone might turn up.

* * *

I used up another bangle to make more silver lace, and left it and the original one for Yolande just before the weekend. What with the seasonal tourists, come for the holidays, and everything else, we were busy straight through, enough that I even considered sleeping on the couch in the office, but Mom had let Mel get there first; there wasn’t room for two and the floor was too hard and cold. When I dragged myself home on Sunday night, I found a silver lace bracelet with a scattering of garnets and three colors of topaz set into its latticework, and a small heap of bright silver bangles waiting to be turned.

There was a note with the bangles, from the jeweler, saying that he loved the work and how much he’d be willing to pay for more of them. 

I was worn down to a nub by then but the thought made me smile; all else failing, I could make a little money with this weird talent, and have something to put aside for a rainy day. Or for a new muffler for the current wreck, to get it through the winter. A little extra money was never a bad thing.

A day later, when I was caught up on sleep, I sat in the sun and thought about lace and felt silver transform itself in my hands. I took the pile of bracelets downstairs and left them for Yolande to send to her jeweler friend.

* * *

A week and a half later, when I came downstairs before dawn, Yolande had left me a note on her delicate violet stationery on the mat at the bottom. I picked it up, put it in my pocket and drove to the coffee shop, only opening it to read when I was in my bakery. 

  
_I have asked; the reply should come soon.  
Yolande_

So. Either the person she was hoping to find would contact her, or someone would say that it wasn’t possible any more. 

Or so I hoped.

On a whim I had slid the jeweled lacework bracelet onto my arm as I went out the door, and it rested well enough inside my sweater sleeve on the drive. When I reached the bakery I thought of taking it off, but hesitated with my hand on it; as I did, it seemed to expand a little. I slid it up my arm until it was above my elbow, where it settled itself as if it were meant to be there. I shrugged my shoulders and turned my attention to whomping the refrigerated dough so that it would be malleable enough to form into those cinnamon rolls that everyone wanted. I mixed up a batch of Tweedle Dumplings and another of Killer Zebras, some orange cinnamon muffins and some Black Brick gingerbread, and got each of them in the oven in their turn, then out on cooling racks and into the hands of the wait staff. The bracelet stayed out of the way the whole time.

Well immersed in the business of feeding people, I didn’t notice the time going by, other than when various timers rang to let me know something had to go into or out of the oven, or rising dough had to be punched down, or cinnamon filling needed to be mixed, or something else needed to be done.

And then Charlie tapped on the door and put his head in.

“Mrs. Bialosky has a guest who wants to meet you,” he said.

“Just a second—“ I wrestled the oven door shut without catching my hand in it, and in doing so caught a glimpse in the window reflection of myself, covered in flour as usual, hair tied up in a scarf.

“I don’t think they’ll care how you look,” Charlie said, and there was something in his voice that made me look at him, something careful and cautious and even a little hopeful.

“All right,” I told him. “As long as it’s not more reporters with cameras and all that.”

“No reporters at all.” Charlie nodded toward Mrs. Bialosky’s booth, where I saw her talking with someone whose back was to me, with gray hair, long, pinned to one side. Then I saw her hand on the edge of the table, wearing that preposterous baroque ring with the green stone.

“Gran?” My voice almost squeaked, if it could be heard at all. But she did hear it. She turned, and got up and waited and I ran over into her arms. 

Mel had come out of the kitchen to see, though he didn’t need to crane his neck like the rest of them. When I turned to glance at him his smile beamed, as much as Charlie’s, and it gave me an idea who he used to run messages for.

Charlie stood in front of Mom, but not so much that she couldn’t have gotten past if she wanted to. I didn’t need to know what was on her face. I turned back to Gran, who, except for her hair being much closer to white than it had been, looked just the same as ever.

“I’ve missed you so much,” I whispered to her.

“And I’ve missed you, child. You’ve grown into a strong woman when I wasn’t here to see.” She looked sad for only the briefest moment. “And your baking is marvelous.”

“We have a lot to catch up on,” I said. “Are you safe? Is it all right for you to come up to visit me at home? Or do we need to meet somewhere else?”

Her voice in my ear was very low, so no one else could hear. “I’m safe, thanks to you and Con. Beauregard was the one who sought me, and that’s why I went into hiding all those years ago. Con told me you were the one who destroyed him, and saved my life.” She hugged me tightly. “You were right to trust Con. He found the place where I had retreated, and told me you might want a teacher.”

“Nobody here knows about him,” I whispered back, very very quietly.

“Of course they don’t.” She smiled at me, and in a normal voice said, “I’d love to come and see your place, if that’s all right.”

I turned to look at Charlie, who had come up behind me. “Can I have –“

“I’ve already called Paulie to come in,” he said, “and I can take things out of the oven. Go. See you tomorrow.” He smiled at my grandmother and she smiled back, and I remembered that Charlie had always been the one to calm Mom down when I used to take the bus to the cabin by the lake.

* * *

Gran and I talked about everything and anything on the ride home, the way you do when you’re catching up on fifteen years of absence. I told her how Charlie had made the bakery for me, and how I came up with new recipes. She told me where she had been living since I’d seen her last, and how Con had helped her.

“I don’t know if he was a good man, when he was alive, but he is a good vampire,” she said. “Inasmuch as he can care about anyone, he cares about you.” Her eyes twinkled. “Of course, that doesn’t mean you should set up housekeeping with him.”

“We visit each other sometimes,” I admitted, “but that’s all. And I have Mel.” And I told her about Mel and his bikes and his cooking, and she listened and smiled.

Yolande was home when we got to the house. I could see her on the porch, pouring tea, but whoever she was pouring it for was invisible behind the rose trellis.

“Would you like to meet my landlady?” I asked Gran, who nodded. Only then did I remember that I should have brought a bag of pastries, but instead I was bringing my grandmother. Yolande still had some of yesterday’s pastries on a plate in front of her; perhaps wardkeeping meant she had some way to keep them from getting stale. I never had that problem at the coffeehouse; everything always ran out by closing, except occasionally part of a loaf of bread, and we’d munch on cinnamon toast and coffee while we opened up in the morning.

I opened the gate and showed Gran through, and we walked together across the grass toward Yolande. She had one of my lace bracelets on the table and the man across from her was looking at it, running his fingers over it. And then he looked up, and saw us –

And I ran across the lawn and up the three steps of the porch into my dad’s arms.

“So, this is where you were going, Onyx.” Gran’s voice, behind me, sounded indulgent. “You could have told me.”

I couldn’t speak. I was too busy getting twenty years of hugs all at once, and remembering how those postcards from him with the blurred return addresses would come two or three a day because he loved me and missed me.

Yolande’s calm voice said, “I see you know one another. Sunshine, this is the teacher I was trying to contact for you.”

“I did get your messages, but I wasn’t sure if it was safe for me to reply,” my dad said. “Then I heard from your grandmother, and learned from Miss Yolande what you were doing … and I wanted to see you again.” He hadn’t let go of me yet. We were the same height now, which I had to get used to; he had seemed so tall when I was five. Now his hair had turned white on the sideburns like small wings brushed toward his ears, but his eyes still had smile crinkles around them.

My jeweled bracelet chose that moment to loosen on my arm and rattle down under my sweater to my wrist, where it was visible.

“This is more of your work? It’s beautiful! We have so much to talk about.” My dad touched the bracelet with respect and a kind of awe, and smiled even more broadly. Gran put her arms around both of us, for a moment. 

“So, you think you can take on a student, even one who works full time as a baker?” I had to say it, had to hear the words out loud. 

“I would be delighted to have you as a student,” my dad said. “Since your skills with metal are more developed than mine, we could learn from each other.”

“We both would,” said Gran. “I might ask you to work on this ring again. It seems to have this habit of catching on things I wear.”

I let out a deep breath I didn’t realize I’d been holding for fifteen years, since Gran disappeared, and the five years longer as well, since Mom and I left the Blaise family enclave and went out on our own. But as I breathed, I realized it went deeper than the release of simple stress. After all the tumult, sun-self, deer-self and tree-self were balancing dark-self, all wrapped in baker-self, magic-self and family-self, as if my life were imitating my cinnamon rolls.

“Can you tell me more about the bracelet on your arm?” Gran asked, as we let go of one another, pulled up more chairs and sat down around the table. Yolande rose to make another pot of tea, smiling as she did -- and so my apprenticeship began.

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Holidays, whatever you celebrate! May your next year be full of goodness.
> 
> Many thanks to sparkslight and zlabya for beta reading and suggestions!
> 
> This is in a very small way a sequel to my previous story, [A Precious Seeing.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/30507) For that reason this is now a series.


End file.
